Various systems and services transmit entertaining, informative, and advertising content to recipients in a continuous broadcast. The most common of these are television and radio broadcasts. More recently, services have begun providing similar content to recipients via other mediums, such as via networks associated with personal computers and mobile devices. For example, many Internet services provide video streams. Some of these services, such as CNN.com, provide users with content similar to that found in television broadcasts. For example, such services may provide access to prerecorded video news reports or live (or near-to live) broadcasts of sporting events. However, apart from the user selecting which video to watch, these sites do not involve user interaction. More user-driven services, such as YouTube.com, typically acquire the content they broadcast from user video file uploads. Although users can rate such clips, they can do little else to interact with the transmission. Apart from the content broadcasted, these user-driven services do not vary much from the aforementioned traditional sites.
Regarding audio transmissions, in addition to traditional radio, individuals have access to a variety of radio programs broadcasted over the Internet as well. Internet radio stations often allow listeners to influence the broadcast by requesting songs, such as by selecting a song from a song library and thereby placing the song into the station's queue. Other Internet radio stations, such as Pandora.com, allow users to generate their own personal broadcast by indicating favorite songs or musicians. The service may then create a broadcast based upon characteristics the service has associated with the song or musician, and thereby attempt to play music that the listener may enjoy. In addition to listening to these stations themselves, users can share their personal stations with other users. While such services enable greater interaction than video broadcasts, the interaction is typically one-way. For example, a listener, perhaps even a majority of the listeners, may not like a song that has been requested, but, apart from contacting the service administrator, these listeners have no immediate way of preventing the song from being played. Furthermore, although user-specific Internet radio stations may reflect the preferences of the individual listener, they lack the community of other services. For example, unless a Pandora.com user shares his station, he is the only one with access to it. Furthermore, if another Pandora.com user listens to a shared station, what he is really being shared is the song preferences and not the actual broadcast. That is, both users listening to the same shared station may not be listening to the same song.
In addition to the distribution of video and audio files, many services enable users to share images, such as photographs and illustrations. For example, Flickr.com allows users to upload pictures which can then be shared with other users. The photographs can be made public so that any visitor to the site may view them, or one may restrict access to the pictures to particular users. Such sites typically can display images in a data stream by scrolling selected images across the screen or by automatically switching from one picture to the next (often called a “slide show”). However, like the data streaming methods of video and audio, apart from providing a rating, users lack a means of affecting the content.
What is lacking is a convenient and enjoyable medium by which users may not only perceive a data stream transmission, but also may influence the content with their own individual input as the transmission is occurring.